Worse than Orphans

‘The human family’, Henry Drummond wrote in The Ascent of Man (1894), is ‘the starting-point and threshold of the true moral life’. Man carries ‘old wild blood in his veins’, while woman makes a home: her passivity is ‘the embryo of patience’. Children, closer to nature, need moral training at their mother’s side. As Florence Dressler wrote in Feminology (1902), maternal love is ‘the greatest safeguard of childhood’. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, fatherhood was less idealised than motherhood, but ‘the tenderness of fathers’ was still to be found ‘in every class of society’, Helen Bosanquet claimed in The Family (1906) – just in different ways. The ‘educated man’ is ‘less tolerant of babydom’, according to Bosanquet, while the ‘working man’ is more like a woman: ‘Forced into close contact with the newcomer from its first arrival, and must take his share in ministering to its needs; and thus he learns almost as soon as its mother to be on terms of intimacy.’

The ‘intimacy’ of poor families, living in cramped lodgings with little or no privacy, was itself cause for concern in the second half of the 19th century. Legislative reform around the education and employment of children, such as the 1870 Education Act and various Factory Acts, reconfigured family roles, while evangelical ideas propagated by figures like Martha Sherwood, who wrote for children, and the clergyman Andrew Boyd, drove new standards of modesty, morality and taste. The poor ‘herd together night and day, eating, drinking, sleeping in common’, the philanthropist Ellen Barlee wrote in 1860, in homes ‘unworthy of the name’. By contrast, the middle-class ‘house beautiful’ was spacious, fashionably decorated and orderly, with rooms divided according to their function and occupant; it was celebrated in a growing body of writing as a sanctuary. ‘Healthy’ homes made for healthy children, Robert Edis argued in Decoration and Furniture of Town Houses (1881). Thomas Horsfall, a philanthropist and heir to a textiles fortune, agreed. Children form ‘habits of thought and feeling’, he wrote in an essay on ‘The Use of Pictures and Other Works of Art in Elementary Schools’ (1884), which ‘may afterwards be modified, but never quite got rid of’. Familiarity with beautiful things could make poor families less likely to drink and gamble, he argued, because it would reveal ‘to many children who live in the crowded parts of large towns some of the highest qualities of their own nature and that of their fellow-creatures’. But in Ancoats in Manchester, where Horsfall established an educational art gallery, children ‘scarcely know what a flower is’ and ‘have never seen a bee’; when one boy came across a skylark, it was in a cage at the local pub (‘Poor lark, and poor lads!’).

Street children came to be regarded as symbols of urbanisation, unemployment and family breakdown. From the mid-1860s, after commercial and religious publishers caught on to the new significance being afforded to childhood, melodramatic ‘waif stories’ circulated widely. Night and Day, the fundraising magazine for Dr Barnardo’s National Incorporated Association for the Reclamation of Destitute Waif Children, used these stories as propaganda, describing the salvation of urchins who roamed the streets by day and ‘curled themselves up at night, like stray, starving dogs’. Thomas Barnardo had come to London from Dublin in 1866 intending to train as a doctor. He didn’t finish his studies, but instead became caught up in efforts to improve the lot of London’s thirty thousand destitute children. He wrote several waif stories himself and the titles tell us a good deal: ‘Taken Out of the Gutter’ (1881); Worse than Orphans (1885); Never Had a Home: A Very Commonplace History (1890). According to such stories, the waif was a helpless bundle of rags ripe for religious conversion. These ‘street Arabs’, as the boys in particular were called, were almost a race apart. Their seeming foreignness was accompanied by a suggestion of sexual depravity; a waif’s rags, a former Barnardo’s official wrote, ‘could not altogether cover the nakedness that would peep out’.

State and voluntary institutions expanded during the 19th century and became increasingly specialised, with agencies such as the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, founded in 1884, given greater powers to investigate ‘problem’ families. Barnardo opened his first children’s home in Stepney in 1870. Children were not ‘taken out of the gutter’ but most often accompanied to the institution by a parent who used it as a last resort, having ‘drifted downward’ after illness, had an accident, or suffered the death of a breadwinner. They had probably already appealed to extended family and neighbours for support. By 1877, hundreds of children were being brought up in homes operated by the association. In the same year, Barnardo was reprimanded at a court arbitration hearing for what were described as ‘fictitious representations of destitution’ (among other things). He had established a photography studio at the Stepney home in 1874 and over the next three decades commissioned around fifty thousand photographs of children admitted to his homes. The earliest of these – the photographs discussed at the arbitration hearing – were ‘before and after’ images that claimed to show the transformation on offer at a Barnardo’s home. Filthy boys and girls, looking sullen or sad and dressed in rags, emerged clean, healthy and properly dressed. But the pictures, it turned out, were staged, with both photography sessions taking place on the same day. Samuel Reed told the hearing that Barnardo tore his clothes with a penknife for his ‘before’ photo, and then put him in new clothes and told him to smile for the ‘after’ photograph.

The Waifs and Strays Society, founded in 1881 by Edward de Montjoie Rudolf, a civil servant and Sunday school teacher in Lambeth, became Britain’s second largest charitable agency for children after Barnardo’s, caring for more than twenty thousand children over the next four decades. The society is the subject of Claudia Soares’s A Home from Home? It aimed to provide ‘a permanent environment of brightness, warmth and “homeliness”’ for children, in contrast to the ‘measured ounces of food, the sameness of the cropped heads, the routine day after day’ at workhouses and other Poor Law institutions. The first home, which opened in Dulwich in 1882, housed twelve girls, and two years later expanded to thirty. As the number of children in the care of the society grew, they were separated into two groups. Those younger than seven were ‘boarded out’ to foster families (though these were often in short supply) and the rest entered one of the society’s residential homes, where they were educated. At twelve, children were transferred to a bigger home for training before being sent to work at fourteen: domestic service for the girls, boot making, bookbinding, tailoring, printing or farming for the boys. Local employment was thought preferable to sending children back to their families, but not all children ‘got on well’ in the world. Among the cases Soares has uncovered are those of Elizabeth R., who was dismissed and sent back to her mother after she wore her mistress’s clothes, and Ellen G., who was sent back to the society for ‘sulkiness’.

Waifs were considered ‘worse than orphans’, as Barnardo put it; orphans at least had no family to question the society’s assumption of authority over them, established through a web of not quite official paperwork. Yet most children entered Waifs and Strays’ care temporarily, when their family’s poverty became acute. Some were seen as more deserving than others. Ernest S.B. was the son of a steady and sober man whose death was no fault of his own. Edith P.’s mother was honest and industrious even though she could no longer provide for her family through washing and needlework. Though they couldn’t always exercise them, parents held ultimate legal rights over children, and many intended to retrieve their child as soon as circumstances allowed. After moving to Boston Spa in 1905, Thomas T.’s mother wrote to request her son’s return: ‘We are settled down here now and his father is in good work.’ A local woman, Miss Bethell, confirmed that Thomas’s mother appeared respectable, and he was sent home. But other parents were dismissed as idle or drunk. Far more common than orphans, and far more troubling, were the children classed as ‘ins and outs’ – those who were sent back home when poverty or illness improved, only to be readmitted to the society when the family situation worsened. The ‘ins and outs’ challenged the notion of the institution as home because they clearly had another home. Some reformers painted them as polluters, returning ‘each time more and more versed in sin’, as Jane Senior put it.

Poor families were expected to pay five shillings a week for their child’s upkeep, an amount that was out of reach for many. Debts could be written off, but the requirement remained, symbolising ‘the natural tie’ between parent and child, and reminding parents of their obligation to provide for their children. At the same time, the society worked hard to keep children’s relatives at bay. Staff assessed the moral worth of families through inspection and casework, often relying on local gossip and judging families on their ability to keep up appearances. A dirty home, Soares notes, meant a deviant family life.

Parents agreed on admission to limit contact with their child and had no say over where they would be placed. The society showed some flexibility in accommodating parents’ wishes, Soares argues, but was more mindful of the views of upstanding members of the local middle class. Since letters of recommendation helped a child gain admittance, vicars and teachers had great power over families who were trying to determine the best option for their child. When Esther R. admitted her daughters, Emily and Ellen, to the care of Waifs and Strays in January 1903, she did not approve their emigration to the colonies, although applications consenting to child emigration, allowed by the Poor Law Board in 1850, were looked on favourably. Alice Willis, the wife of the local curate, had written of Esther’s ‘bad surroundings’ in her referral letter for the girls and pressed Esther to consent. By April, relations had soured between Esther and Alice, but the two girls had already been placed in a training home in preparation for a move to Canada. ‘I very much object to this sort of thing,’ Esther wrote to the Waifs and Strays. ‘You know that I signed against it.’ The society didn’t let Esther revoke her consent to emigration and she removed her daughters to an orphanage in Hampton.

In their attempts to supersede the biological family, both Barnardo’s and the Waifs and Strays Society encouraged children to see the head of the organisation as a paternal figure. Waifs and Strays children were told to address Rudolf as ‘Uncle Edward’, while Barnardo portrayed himself as ‘father’ to the ‘largest family in the world’. Children were allowed to write to their actual relatives, usually once a month, but this depended on the whims of staff, and letters were inspected and sometimes censored. According to Our Waifs and Strays, the society’s monthly periodical, the children at St Agnes’s Home referred to the matron as ‘mother’, and the boys at the Bognor Home called their master ‘dad’. But ‘mother’ isn’t ‘mammy’, as Soares notes, and homesick children would have felt the difference.

The ‘children of rich people’, as the Waifs and Strays Society called them, could read about the fate of their poorer peers in Brothers and Sisters, the society’s fundraising magazine. They were encouraged to pity the plight of their less fortunate ‘brother’ or ‘sister’, and to donate their pocket money to the cause. They were also invited to attend open days and tea parties, where their presence must have helped put the waifs in their proper place (among many instances of Christian hypocrisy in these accounts, the editors of Brothers and Sisters told children that their donations made them like the ‘child Jesus’).

Soares​ is particularly interested in the ways that Waifs and Strays homes replicated the intimate rituals of daily family life, setting themselves in contrast to the ‘absence of natural pleasures and human interests’ at other children’s institutions, where life was ‘dreary and colourless’. At St Agnes’s Home the beds had bright red covers; at the Olive House Home there were pictures on the walls and flowers on the tables. The girls at Marylebone Home could ‘enjoy a natural life even within the walls of a “Home”’. They rose at six to do housework before breakfast and prayers at eight, followed by school on weekdays. Tea – soup or stew – was served at five, followed by more housework and then play in the evenings or a walk during summer. Weekends were mostly spent on housework, needlework and darning, but after Sunday school there was time for ‘writing, singing etc’.

Masters and matrons lived alongside children and supervised their daily activities; some even tucked their charges in at night. The ‘most unselfish’ child might be rewarded, perhaps with a book, while naughty children were sent to bed without pudding. Each child was given pocket money, to teach thriftiness, which could be spent during ‘a fortnight’s change of air’ by the seaside. Children needed nurturing, but also to nurture others, whether smaller children or the master’s dog. At St Andrew’s Home in Reading, the boys grew vegetables. When the donkey at the Fareham Home died, he was mourned as part of the household.

The voices of the children themselves emerge only occasionally in the archive. One letter published in Our Waifs and Strays, written by a nine-year-old boy, tells readers that ‘we have a live rabbit, and we keep a pig and he is growing such a big one, and we went picking up leaves for it, and he romps and rolls in them because he likes them so … we have got a cat, and she follows us to church, and waits for us till we come out.’ Some children continued to write to their former master or matron after leaving the home, or sent photographs of themselves. Aftercare provision gradually became more formalised in the early 20th century, and in 1915 the Waifs and Strays appointed a ‘lady visitor’ to check on girls after they left the homes. Children sent overseas (migration to Canada continued until 1930) were less well cared for and little effort was made to ensure they transitioned successfully into adult life. ‘I am doing alright,’ 17-year-old Lucy B. told her family, soon after she arrived there. ‘But I am so lonely here.’

Soares turns on its head the assumption that abuse has always been prevalent in children’s institutions. She shows that ordinary acts of intimacy fostered the ‘feel’ of family: at the Leicester Boys’ Home, the older boys bathed the younger ones, as many would have done in their family homes; at the Clarendon Home in Hull, the babies and youngest children slept with the matron. When Nellie P. was smacked with a slipper at the Rose Cottage Home in 1905, the NSPCC intervened, and the matron was dismissed. But institutions have the power to shape their archives, and it is likely that many cases of abuse went unrecorded. Violence and sex, including between the children, didn’t make it into the pages of Our Waifs and Strays, but the records of bad dreams and bedwetting speak to the distress felt by many children.

What power does a child have? You could refuse your food or try to run away or escape into your imagination. You could take out your unhappiness on the smaller ones or on yourself. Soares refers to the ‘psychological unease of institutional life’. The institution was home, but it wasn’t. Some children did run away or severed contact with staff after their discharge (others cut ties to avoid stigma). The Waifs and Strays Society, like Barnardo’s, defined itself against the chaos of the workhouse, but it didn’t always provide a stable environment. In November 1910, Lesley N.’s mother wrote to complain that her son ‘has had five homes now since the society first took him in last February and now want to move him to London’.

Rudolf remained director of the society until 1919; Soares’s study ends in 1920. The 1926 Adoption Act reconfigured parent-child relations once more, legalising the transfer of orphan or ‘illegitimate’ children to new parents and increasing the power of institutions to detain children – making good, we might say, on Rudolf’s vision of a ‘permanent’ change of environment for some children. In 1946, the society became the Church of England Children’s Society. We know it now as the Children’s Society, and it doesn’t run any children’s homes. When Barnardo died, in 1905, his funeral procession through the East End was ‘lined by a dense crowd of hushed and reverent people, many of them sobbing’, according to his charity’s National Waifs’ Magazine, ‘the roughest and poorest men among them’.

Soares refers to the children she writes about as ‘transient inhabitants’. It’s an interesting formulation. Children do, in a sense, only transiently inhabit childhood, and the lives of poor children from the past are especially prone to vanishing. Like Barnardo’s, Waifs and Strays photographed children for its public messaging, and Soares includes some of these images in A Home from Home? It’s striking, looking at them, how often the children were photographed on the threshold or outside the ‘home’: standing in a doorway peeking into another room; posing against the garden wall or along the picket fence. Are they home, or are they not? After the Barnardo’s scandal, the society began photographing the children against blank backgrounds, as if they came from nowhere and belonged nowhere – children without history.